.root()

Coded Aesthetics

A research group at the School of Culture and Communication, University of
Melbourne, dedicated to developing the transdisciplinary knowledge needed
to address the new epistemic boundaries introduced by machine learning.

Our everyday activities are increasingly co-produced by ML, as the
computational enters areas of creative production, urban spaces, and
cultural institutions. We explore and provide insights into how the digital
is operationalised — in text-to-image AI, in computational photography, in
natural language processing, in biometric surveillance — among other
processes.

Core questions

• How are aesthetic processes — sense-making and world-building — emerging
  in the computational era?
• What interventions and insights can critical humanities scholars offer
  in exploring and contextualising these processes?

Transdisciplinary by design

The generative potential of code is taking new forms, positioning us within
a paradigmatic shift that asks us to navigate new ways of seeing — and new
ways of making sense of sense-making.

We work at the boundary between humanities and machine learning, drawing on
media theory, visual culture, philosophy of photography, and science and
technology studies. There is a distinct two-way delay between knowledge
produced in computer science and HASS disciplines; CODED AESTHETICS exists
to close that gap.